Ethical Conundrum Quotes

It is better to destroy 100 innocent people than to let one guilty one escape.

He [William Gladstone] made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.

The lesser evil is also evil.

it is better to mistakenly kill an innocent person then to mistakenly spare an enemy.

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?

The ultimate test ... to see the good in evil and the evil in good.

The problem of good and evil is not the problem of good and evil, but only the problem of evil. In opposition to good there are evil characters, but there are no good characters in opposition to evil. Evil is arguable, but good is not. Therefore the Devil always wins the argument.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

... good and evil are so interwoven in life that every good, traced up far enough, is found to involve evil. This is the great mystery of life.

If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

Are there any good guys on 'Prison Break?' I suppose there might be. I can't honestly say whether I'm a good guy or a bad guy or I'm a good guy in wolf's clothing or sheep's clothing.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

To say that being non-judgmental is better than being judgmental is itself a judgment, and therefore a violation of principle.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

We've had to deal with so many complications. We're still dealing with them. And what can we do? Nothing - well, unless we take your side's point of view and make deals with the devil. But why? Why can't we make deals with God? People do all the time. 'God, if you do this for me, I promise to be good.' Stuff like that. Yeah, but I don't see any contracts like you guys have. No hard evidence that it works. How come we can only get things we want by being bad? Why can't we get them by being good?

Contemporary audiences are interested in watching characters navigate ethical challenges and moral dilemmas.

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.